Between snippets of conversation with those at her table, Winnie examined Abel’s body language. He was relaxed, gesturing constantly, talking with his hands. He smiled often and laughed often, too. She studied his features. All rolled into a visual package, the man wasn’t handsome in the manner that she found attractive. But he was pleasant to look at, she thought, much like a favorite old dress is pleasing to the eye but not a knockout when slipped on and viewed in the mirror.
Cups of mint tea arrived, followed closely by a strawberry tart sweetened with honey. Small bowls of roasted sunflower seeds were placed on the tables, too, and more wine offered. It was too much. Winnie waved away the dessert.
Abel rose from his seat, reached the podium once more and spread his hands before the audience.
“Independency is not about me. It is about us. Before we adjourn from this dining hall, I want to be sure that you meet some remarkable people. The mimes’ eyes flared wide, toothy smiles erupted on their faces, and they waved come in toward the door. In walked two-dozen townsfolk, women and men, children, elderly. They all had aprons on emblazoned with a big strawberry print.
“Now, I want you to meet the very people who lovingly fashioned this marvelous creation we all enjoyed, called dinner.” At that Abel began to applaud, and the diners joined in. Soon they were rising from their tables in a standing ovation.
“Thank you, noble chefs, for a remarkable feast, a most splendid repast here tonight. And thank you, mimes, for giving us an evening of raspberries. Now let’s go to First Day Hall and have a little fun.”
Chapter Nine
At 4:44 a.m. in the frost-riddled October predawn darkness, a shallow rolling tremor rocked the South Arm research station cabin in the forests south of Plover Point on Yellowstone Lake. Liz did not stir when the vibrations rippled through the building. Two miles from the lake’s northern shores, at a watery depth of nearly 200 feet, the bulging inflated plain strata slumped southward. The movement destabilized the long humpback formation that had fascinated the geological community since sonar soundings discovered it two decades earlier. Fissures bleeding super-hot water lubricated the swelling’s underbelly; the bulge began to slide and fracture. The rock blister was a loaded cannon, primed with superheated water and under fantastic pressure. As the colossal formation shifted, great chucks of unstable material broke away. The breakup freed seething, bottled-up vapors. Liberated from its weighty cork, tens of millions of gallons of superheated water in the strata below expanded a thousandfold, flashing to steam in an instant.
The heavy overburden of sediments and stone layers more than 200 feet thick on the lake bottom disintegrated before the force of a stupendous steam explosion and ballooned through the surface of Yellowstone Lake with a hellfire roar. The shattering noise of the explosion radiated out in all directions of the compass and reached the cabin where Liz slept within forty seconds. The concussion shook the building and shattered windows.
The geophysicist awoke with a shout and stumbled away from her bunk, somehow avoiding the glass shards strewn across the floorboards. Clattering noises and the sound of heavy raindrops managed to get through to her senses. She raced out the door of the cabin and onto the porch to see sand, tiny pebbles, small chucks of stone and dark rain cascading from a bright night sky. Watching the debris fall, she understood in a moment that the inflated plain swelling must have ruptured. Fear seized her.
The explosion was a shrill signal. The lake bottom to the north had to have been violently displaced, Liz knew. Surely there would be another tsunami-like seiche wave generated, but this one would likely be monstrous. She calculated quickly and decided there was no safe haven. Sprinting back inside, the woman scrambled up on a second level bunk bed and reached overhead to a trap latch to open a small door into the eaves of the building. She threw the door back on its hinges, stood up on the bed and hoisted herself up out of the room, into the cramped quarters under the peak of the roof.
The cascade of falling material and moisture on the metal roof sounded a drum roll. Through the din came the loud crack from a tree rent by great force. Something was stalking through the forest, the noise of it growing louder than the slapping on the roof. Liz braced herself against the structure’s timbers just as the cabin shuddered violently. Glass exploded inward and the door was ripped away. The porch roof collapsed and the porch floorboards splintered and floated free. The little structure lurched to one side as a surge of lake water threw its weight against the building and overtopped the roof. The cabin pivoted around on an axis, cut free from its mortar and stone foundation to rotate in the flood. Rising water lifted the building. It floated free of its moorings and drifted three dozen feet across the small grassy plot it had been built in. The cabin rammed into the trees along the edge of the clearing, then settled to the ground, water and skim lake ice draining from the main room.
Chapter Ten
Benjamin White Elk sensed the herd migration at first light. Slumbering in his tiny hardscrabble camp beside Otatso Creek, he detected the low-frequency vibrations and rhythmic cadence of big animals on the move. He lay in his bunk, rubbing the morning crags and crevasses out of his ruddy face.
The elder never tired of this, hearing the ponoká, the animals the Europeans had called elk, moving at dawn. Cursing the arthritic swelling in his knees, White Elk pushed the bunk covers aside, placed his calloused feet on the floor and shuffled slowly to the front door. He opened it quietly and slipped out onto the narrow camp porch.
The Blackfoot elder stood as rigid as square-faced Chief Mountain towering in the west along the eastern boundary of Glacier National Park. Before him, quadruped monarchs paraded as they made their way southward, their muscled yellow rumps facing away from Canada. The great herd was moving down from the glacier moraines, out of the mountains. Night temperatures in the high country were already brittle cold. The increasing briskness and the dwindling light of fall was the only timepiece the great cadre of ungulates needed to tell them it was time to descend to the valleys for the winter.
“Oki-ni-kso-ko-wa,” muttered the elder under his breath, the words an ancestral greeting, spoken this time to the mammalian friends of the Blackfoot’s South Piegan tribe and to the animal for which he was named.
When he was a youth, White Elk, following the initiation customs of his ancestors, ran into the forests to be alone and to fast for many days. On his final day without sustenance, as he knelt by a small stream for a drink of glacier meltwater, a mammoth ponoká the color of snow and adorned with soaring antlers came to the opposite stream bank to watch the human. The young brave could not decide if the beast was a vision or bone and flesh. The fasting ritual was supposed to encourage visions, and they were to etch the path to the man’s future and provide him with a new name by which the tribe would know him until his death.
The white beast spoke to him in the tongue of the Blackfoot. “You are young now. When you grow to a great age, you will guide the people. You will do well by them. There will come a day of great suffering, when the land will tremble and all will wither before a fierce conflagration. But you, you will be the strength of the people. You will spirit them through the time of hardship. You will be revered. A thousand generations hence, they will speak of you, White Elk.”
The young man, in awe of the beast, spoke to the animal in turn, but the elk lifted its massive head, turned and marched off through the bitterbush.